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Context No. 678 of 4322 · 1 Samuel

Context · Reflection

1 Samuel 19:15-19: in context

15Saul sent the messengers to see David, saying, “Bring him up to me in the bed, that I may kill him.” 16When the messengers came in, behold, the teraphim was in the bed, with the pillow of goats’ hair at its head. 17Saul said to Michal, “Why have you deceived me like this and let my enemy go, so that he has escaped?” Michal answered Saul, “He said to me, ‘Let me go! Why should I kill you?’” 18Now David fled and escaped, and came to Samuel at Ramah, and told him all that Saul had done to him. He and Samuel went and lived in Naioth. 19Saul was told, saying, “Behold, David is at Naioth in Ramah.”

Saul's jealousy of David has hardened into a plan to kill him. He sends men to watch David's house through the night and take him in the morning. Standing between them is Michal, Saul's own daughter, who is also David's wife. She lets David down through a window into the dark, and then she buys him time. She lays a household idol in the bed, puts a net of goats' hair at its head, and covers it, and tells the messengers he is sick.

Saul is not put off. Bring him up to me in the bed, he says, that I may kill him. The men come in and find the idol. When Saul turns on Michal, she lies again, claiming David had threatened her life. By then he is gone, fled to Samuel at Ramah. The scene is an old one in new clothes: a generation earlier Rachel had hidden her father's household gods and deceived Laban with them. Here a daughter uses an idol and a lie to deceive her father and save her husband, choosing, in the space of one night, which of the two men she belongs to.

Michal had to choose in the dark between the father who bore her and the husband she loved. When two loyalties pull against each other, which one do I quietly protect?

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